On Friday, March 3, some local movers and shakers gathered at Maxim’s, the city’s art nouveau special-events venue, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Stop Smiling. It’s a slick locally produced and internationally distributed lifestyle magazine whose declared mission is to recapture the freewheeling spirit of class acts like Esquire and Playboy in their glory days.
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Glass is right: Stop Smiling has a lot to recommend it. Each issue, organized loosely around a single theme, aims for a timeless quality at odds with the “flavor-of-the-week” ethic of celebrity journalism. The editors idolize the giants of New Journalism’s golden age. Recent features have included selections from the papers of Terry Southern, reminiscences by friends and associates of the late Hunter S. Thompson, and, in the “boxing” issue, a lengthy, fascinating interview with Norman Mailer conducted by his son. “We’re not trying to sell anything,” says editor and publisher JC Gabel. “We’re not trying to be hard-nosed journalists and we’re not trying to be fluff. . . . We’re a lifestyle magazine technically, in the eyes of advertisers, but if anything we’re a lifestyle magazine that’s poking fun at the idea of what a lifestyle magazine is.”
Not long ago, Gabel brought in an advertising manager who’s helped pack the pages with glossy, four-color pitches for Absolut and Scion at the rate, at least officially, of $4,500 a page. They also brought in a private investor they decline to name, and last year they were able to move the enterprise out of Gabel’s Bucktown apartment and into a fixer-upper storefront on Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park. The rear of the space is full of iMacs, squeaky new Ikea fittings, and stacks and stacks of back issues. The airy front room is intended to function as an events space for parties and for public discussions with authors and other figures. Gabel’s currently talking to WBEZ about broadcasting them.
That sound you just heard? Was it Hunter Thompson spinning in his grave? There’s a difference between lionizing bygone writers such as Thompson and carrying on their legacy of profane truth-telling. Those writers were often adversarial; they put the interests of their readers before the interests of their subjects.
The Stop Smiling guys could learn a little from their idols. One of the Royko columns excerpted in the Chicago issue is on the importance of keeping your subjects at arm’s length. “If I sit down for dinner with a president,” Royko wrote, “I feel like an ‘in-person.’ I am no longer some guy who grew up along Milwaukee Avenue. I am a VIP, big heat, or why else would a prez invite me to chow down at the White House? . . . So as much as I like politicians, I keep my distance. It’s the only way I can keep whatever scruffy integrity I have.”
